ALTERNATIVE NEWS

3 Dec 2011

Yanis Varoufakis from yanisvaroufakis.eu. He talks about the deteriorating situation in Greece economically and politically and what is happening in Italy and how that will impact Greece. Yanis Varoufakis is an economist who heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens.Also:

The dept crisis in Eurozone district could actually endanger the global economy and cause credit to dry up in the global banking system. Based on OECD, it can be a key rest to the world economy. Leaders of Germany and France had acknowledged that the debt crisis could last for years. In Britain over two million protesters poured on the streets to show their anger over their government's austerities.In this edition of News Analysis, we will examine the Eurozone debt crisis.

Angelo: Our gratitude to those who have sighted the phenomenon of Iceland. We thought that contrary to the rest of the world, Iceland has not made private bankster dept public and they are even trying to jail negligent banksters. Here we havearesponse from a citizen at ground zero in the form of a letter to Max Keiser:

Having read and watched some of the stuff you have published on Iceland I want to thank you for your effort to explain things to the world in plain English. You are still misinformed about some of the things happening here in Iceland. I put the following comment on to your page but also want to send it to you directly:

It is a total nonsense that the Icelandic government has been using state money to help hard-pressed households.The Icelandic government has been guarding the banks like it would mean the end of the world if the appropriate debt restructuring would take place. The only restructuring of debts that has taken place is because a small group of people (that I belong to) has been demanding that every day for more than three years. The government and the banks have been giving into our demands and with heavy heart. This is not what they wanted and when IMF came here, they did not have this in mind. IMF came here to protect foreign creditor’s assets in Iceland.

Have in mind that when the three major banks collapsed in October 2008 and new were founded on their ruins the loan portfolio was transferred from the old banks to the new one on fair value, that is with heavy discount. The government has been backing the banks in trying as hard as they can to collect the loans at claim value in the old banks but not at book value/fair value in the new banks. For this reason the new banks have been profiting like never before returning some 180 bn IKR for the first three years of operation and that is only from operation here in Iceland. The old banks were only able to make such profit pre-collapse because of their international operation. Most of the profit comes from revaluation of loans that they got heavily discounted. So they are operating like hedge funds. Buying cheap and selling at higher price. And they call them self banks!

Have in mind that criminal investigation is under way on the conduct of the bankers pre-collapse. Also have in mind that loans in Iceland are heavily indexed so the principal takes changes according to the index used. The fx-index went up 70-150 per cent because of the devaluation of the IKR. The CPI has gone up some 60 per cent since January 2005. We that fight for justice here in Iceland want this to be corrected as this mutation in the indices was the result of what the bankers did. A parliament report suggests that the banks were not run properly, most likely breaking law, running Ponzi schemes, hoaxes, frauds, etc. (As it turns out that is what banking seems to be about all around the world.) Well we want the banks to return the plunder, that is what was taken from us through their actions. We find them as much a thieve as the ones that break into our homes and steal a TV or jewelry. People all over the world should also demand that the banks return what they have been taking from them in the name of “banking”, that actually has nothing to do with banking but is basically the biggest sting ever set up.

Sure the Icelandic government did not rescue the old banks and the creditors had to take a hit. And that is what has to happen all over the world. Lets never forget that banks and investors (hedge funds) run their own risk management programs. If their risk assessment fails that is their to swallow not their customers. If a car retailer sells me a car and the it goes burst, it is not mine to compensate them for their misfortune. The same should apply to bank and hedge funds. If Goldman Sachs has trillions of toxic assets they have to deal with it and get out of the mess them self. Oh, I forget. They are too big to fail. Then break the company into pieces and make each piece only so big that it can fail with out the global financial system going down to its knees.

There's been a massive rise in the use and abuse by the UK's police with their new Taser toy, so much so, that the Home Office don't even publish details of it's use in public any more, and Channel4 News had to use the Freedom of Information request to get the details the police and home office are trying to hide. The Tasers are being used increasingly on innocent people by trigger happy police. Tasers are gadgets for state sponsored torture.

Additional:Last year, two-thirds of the country's police forces fired Tasers significantly more - some by up to 800 per cent - than in the preceding year, a Channel 4 News investigation can disclose.

At least 30 of the country's 43 forces discharged the controversial firearm - which sends out a 50,000 volt shock either by emitting two darts or placing the stun gun directly onto the body - more times than last year.

Forces collectively fired Tasers more than 1,500 times in the year ending March 2011, 70 per cent more than the previous year, with the average force increase 130 per cent.

The findings, accessed through Freedom of Information, throw into doubt comments last week by the new Metropolitan Police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, who said fewer people are being tasered by officers.

Mr Hogan-Howe was arguing that every Met police car should have a Taser in it following an incident in which four police officers were stabbed in a butcher's shop in north west London. At present, only trained firearms officers are equipped with Taser guns.

"We have seen this in other forces around the country. It has not led to more people being tasered, but it does lead to officers and the public being kept safer."

Amnesty International described the new set of figures as "alarming" and queried Mr Hogan-Howe's comments.

The organisation urged the Home Office to investigate the reason for the massive increase and called for sweeping changes to the current guidelines, which are issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).

Spokeswoman Eulette Ewart said: "Amnesty International considers these findings to be particularly alarming, given the level of increase in such a short period of time.

"These findings indicate that there is a clear disparity between the number of firings that occur in some forces compared to others. That indicates that there's a lack of clarity to the guidelines: to when the Taser should be fired and when it shouldn't.

"We are calling for the Home Office to thoroughly review Acpo guidelines in terms of how these Tasers are used, so we would question the comments made by Mr Hogan-Howe." Full story/source

The Western mainstream media falsifies the news resorting to euphemisms, half-truths and lies in the best (worst) style of George Orwell’s novel 1984. We all live in the unreal world of “Newspeak” used by the Global Power Elite to control our minds.

Man gets confused when things that happen around him and to him, or which are done in his name, cannot be properly grasped, understood or made sense of. Normally, such confusion leads to inaction. If you’re lost at night in the middle of a forest but you can still see the stars, then a bit of astronomical knowledge will at least quickly tell you which way is north. But if it’s cloudy or you’re ignorant of the constellations in starry heaven, then you might as well light up a fire and do nothing until dawn…. You’re Lost!

Today, mainstream media coverage uses programmed distortion, confusion, even outright lying when its Money Power masters order it to support the “official story” on any major political, economic or financial process. When looked at closely, however, the “official story” of things can be seen to be inaccurate, misleading, often hardly believable if not downright stupid.

Examples of this: Iraq’s inexistent WMD’s leading to the invasion and destruction of that country; global mega-banker bail-outs with taxpayer money; irrational US diplomatic, military, financial and ideological alignment to Israeli objectives; “we-killed-Osama-Bin-Laden-and-dumped-his-body-into-the-sea”; and the wide array of “whodunits” surrounding 9/11 in New York and Washington, 7/7 in London, the AMIA/Israeli Embassy attacks in Buenos Aires in 1992/1994, and – of course – that all time favorite: who shot JFK…?

These are but a few of the paradigmatic cases that have at least served to trigger millions of people to wake up and think with their own minds instead of the mainstream media’s! But unfortunately the vast majority of such cases are not so clear-cut. The vast majority of Newspeak lies are like knots, difficult to untie as they carry built-in complexity resembling Gordian Knots. And, as with all Gordian Knots, you need to cut right through them, and this requires swift and precise action plus a good measure of intellectual courage.

To give an example of what we say, let’s take a quick look at how a “Newspeak” operation works. It requires sequential planning, it requires time, it requires proper logistics, it requires “credible” spokespeople in public and private sectors, it requires choosing the right words and images at the right time and in the right circumstances.

So, let’s say the Global Power Elite – working through the governments of the US, UK, EU into which they are deeply embedded, and joint-venturing with a wide array of media outlets, defense companies, oil companies, security and construction companies, and powerful lobbies – decide that they wish to overrun and destroy a specific country… Libya, for example…

How do they ensure that “the international community” will just quietly look on (except for the still relatively small minority of voices that are increasingly raising hell against them)?

The Seven Step Mainstream Media Country Destruction Guide

1. First, they start by targeting a country ripe for “Regime Change”, and brand it a “rogue state”; then…

3. As mock UN Security Council Resolutions are staged that rain death and destruction upon millions of civilians, they call it “UN sanctions to protect civilians”; then…

4. They spread flagrant lies through their “newsrooms” and paid journalists, and call it "the international community’s concerns expressed by prestigious spokespeople and analysts…” then…

5. They bomb, invade and begin to control the target country and call it “liberation”; then…

6. As the target country falls fully under their control, they impose “the kind of democracy that we want to see” (as Hillary Clinton before visiting Egypt and Tunisia on March 10, 2011), until finally…

7. They steal appetizing oil, mineral and agricultural reserves handing them over to Global Power Elite corporations, and impose unnecessary private banking debt and call it “foreign investment and reconstruction.”

Their keynotes are: Force and Hypocrisy, which they have used time and again to destroy entire countries, always in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”. Utmost force and violence is used to achieve their ends and goals.

Their Elders recommended this many decades ago in a blueprint for World Domination written on a hoary manuscript of old…

“What did you say…? That you don’t want to be ‘liberated’ and ‘democratized’?!?”

The backlash against a formerly obscure California mobile-monitoring software maker grew even larger Thursday, with a senator asking questions, citizens bombing the company with bad online reviews, and former customer Apple swearing it off.

Adding possible legal jeopardy to its woes, a former federal prosecutor is also publicly wondering whether Carrier IQ, whose phone-monitoring software was secretly installed on millions of phones, was illegally wiretapping Americans’ communications.

Carrier IQ’s software is installed on phones sold by Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, among others, and is intended to help carriers know what problems users are having and what features are most popular.

Meanwhile, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) demanded that the Mountain View company explain what user data was being captured by the Carrier IQ software .

The brouhaha surrounds the recently published research by 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart of Connecticut, whose video Wired.com posted on Tuesday. The video showed Carrier IQ software logging much of what Eckhart was typing, including text messages, phone numbers and even an encrypted Google search on an Android phone.

“I am very concerned by recent reports that your company’s software — preinstalled on smartphones used by millions of Americans — is logging and may be transmitting extraordinarily sensitive information from consumers’ phones,” Franken wrote (.pdf) Carrier IQ’s president, Larry Lenhart.

The software cannot be removed or stopped by a phone’s owner unless the phone is rooted, though Apple says users can easily stop diagnostic data from being sent to Apple.

Carrier IQ initially threatened Eckhart with a lawsuit unless he apologized for his research and retracted his statement that it was a “rootkit,” but relented after Eckhart got legal help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But that didn’t stop the online backlash. As of early Thursday afternoon, Google Places had more than 200 reviews of the company – nearly all of which were blasting the company.

Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless carrier, denies using the software.

Sprint, the third-place carrier, defended its use of the secret software.

“We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool,” Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge-Walsh said in an e-mail. “The information collected is not sold and we don’t provide a direct feed of this data to anyone outside of Sprint.”

T-Mobile says it uses Carrier IQ, as well.

“T-Mobile utilizes the Carrier IQ diagnostic tool to troubleshoot device and network performance with the goal of enhancing network reliability and our customers’ experience,” a spokeswoman Patty Raz said in an e-mail. “T-Mobile does not use this diagnostic tool to obtain the content of text, email or voice messages, or the specific destinations of a customers’ internet activity, nor is the tool used for marketing purposes.”

Carrier IQ said the data is used to enhance the mobile-user experience and “to assist operators and device manufacturers in delivering high-quality products and services to their customers.” It said it was not logging keystrokes.

The data, Carrier IQ says, is “encrypted and secured within our customer’s network or in our audited and customer-approved facilities.”

In an interview with Wired.com last week, the company’s marketing manager said Carrier IQ could read mobile users’ text messages.

University of Colorado law and telecommunications scholar Paul Ohm, a former federal prosecutor, said in a telephone interview that the software “verges on wiretapping.”

What’s most alarming about it, he said, was that it exists.

“There’s a lot of really sensitive stuff that you never ever realized that anybody was saving,” he said. “One really likely scenario, the FBI, once they get wind of this, it’s going to give them a trove of information.”

Carrier IQ boasts in promotional materials that its product “takes customer experience profiling to another level, enabling you to view experience data at any level of granularity from the entire population, to comparative groups, down to individual users, all at the touch of a button.” (.pdf)

The Israeli army has accelerated the implementation of several steps and measures along the border with Syria the urgent preparations have raised fears and sparked debates in the light of the events that are taking place in Syria. Press TV's Hamad Awidat reports from Golan Heights.

LA police used nearly a dozen undercover detectives to infiltrate the Occupy LA encampment in the weeks before Wednesday's raid to learn about plans of resistance and the location of any weapons that might be used against police.

An official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said none of the officers slept at the camp, but blended in with the protesters during the day. The undercover work yielded information that some protesters were preparing bamboo spears and other potentially dangerous weapons in preparation for an expected eviction by the LAPD. Full story/source

The United States is quickly coming to resemble a post industrial neo-3rd-world country. Unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, falling real wages and household incomes, growing poverty and increasing concentration of wealth are major trends in the U.S. today. Behind these growing problems are monetary inflation created by the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies, federal government deficit spending and the dominant influence of “too big to fail” banks and large corporations in Washington D.C., which has altered the direction of law in the United States. To make matters worse, the U.S. government faces a historic fiscal crisis.

High unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, low wages, widespread poverty, extreme concentration of wealth, unsustainable government debt, control of the government by international banks and multinational corporations, weak rule of law and counterproductive policies are defining characteristics of 3rd world countries. Other factors include poor public health, nutrition and education, as well as lack of infrastructure—factors that deteriorate rapidly in a failing economy.

Apparently ineffective regulation and relatively little law enforcement action by the federal government in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown resulted in widespread speculation that special interests had taken priority over the rule of law. Critics have also charged that the federal government’s policies threaten to eliminate what remains of the American middle class. Full story and charts source

With world markets still convulsing and gold and silver reasserting themselves once again, today King World News interviewed former LBMA commodities broker and trader and current MEP Nigel Farage to get his take on the situation. Farage had some powerful comments regarding the direction of gold, but when KWN asked about the chaos in Europe, Farage stated,“As the Italian credit rating started to slip, the Brussels bosses and the German Chancellor said, ‘He’s (Berlusconi has) got to go and we want our man in charge.’ And so Mr. Mario Monti, who was a European Commissioner for ten years, one of the architects of the euro when it was introduced, a man who wasn’t even in the Italian Parliament, has been put in charge and is now the Prime Minister of Italy.”

Nigel Farage continues:

“He has chosen his cabinet to run Italy and would you believe not a single member of the Italian cabinet is an accountable, elected politician. Democracy has been hijacked, thrown away, in the name of preserving the euro. And I mean, frankly, this is how dictatorships start. I mean this is absolutely terrifying.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage trashed Conservative MP Matthew Hancock on the Tories policy of saving the Euro, instead of thinking about the British people paying to bailout others fecklessness.

The Conservative MP proves that the Tories are more interested in saving Europe, then the British people who care being crippled with ever more taxes to give Europe ever more bailouts. Let the Euro collapse is less painful to all.One thing not mentioned by anyone, is that the Lisbon CONstitution is self amending, so any proposed treaty will NOT be voted on by the people, it will be decided by a bunch of clique crooks in Brussels. Source

Unlike the broad consensus of prognosticators who feel the road for the US is a decade or more, Bass sees a three-to-five year window for a credible solution to the debt saturation or else kicking the can will cease to have any impact. The reason for the proximity is the acceleration of what happens in Europe and Japan with that respective chronology his central view - which he sees a s critical in understanding for every money manager.

In this extended interview at AmeriCatalyst, he points to the optimistic self-deception biases that leave people unable to comprehend the scenarios as they either lead to a really bad outcome or a nominally bad outcome. Using the Lehman moment as an example, Bass explains how we have been conditioned to believe there is always a backstop or savior...now those backstops at a corporate and sovereign level (central banks and the IMF for example) are being called into question in their roles (being seen for what they are - as just promises) and it is the chasm between what we want to believe and what does happen that is enormous and leaves the extreme volatility, risk-on/risk-off market the way it is.

Reiterating how critical the psychology of today's situation, Bass goes on to debunk the optimism of globalization (at least for the Western world), destroy the myth of a 50% greek writedown solution, Japanese xenophobia and savings losses, structural versus cyclical implications for US equity deterioration, US deficits and housing's bottom, global debt saturation and how this tearing at the social fabric of the world will lead to - war.

Click image for video (no embed available)

This extended interview includes some of the following views (among many others):

On Greece:

For those who think a 50% write-down on debt will fix Greece, you have lost your mind. It is only a full wipe-out of the non-TROIKA-owned debt that is the only mathematical way for Greece to have any chance.

On the IMF and its role as global savior

He discusses in some detail Keynes and the IMF formation and the new world order he foresees as our era of the largest peacetime accumulation of global debt has no precedent (as it has historically ended in conflict or been created by conflict).

And how this debt saturation will inebitably play out:

Fundamentally, its about the social fabric of the world...what does this all mean? It means war.

And summarizing for every long-only talking head pitch-man:

This is not a cyclical rebound from a crisis we had two years and you should NOT be buying stocks because a P/E ratio is low relative to historical S&P behavior because the E is wrong. We are going to see declines and people don't know how to position themselves for declines. We are at peak earnings now! Earnings only look good because if you take all the bad assets and put them on the public balance sheet.

We need to delever globally. We haven't delevered. Just now we are seeing marginal delevering in Europe and all hell is breaking loose. An summing up:

Consensus is US low/slow GDP growth - no recession, US better than Europe, Europe mild recession, muddle through, go all in to Emerging markets as that's where the convexity is.

The consensus is never going to be right.

I don't get paid to be an optimist or a pessimist. I get paid to be a realist and the realist negative currently.

Don't believe these governments when they tell you everything is going to fine. The day before Mexico devalued by 60% they denied that they would ever devalue. They can and will never tell you the truth. Find your own numbers.

The new job numbers are out for the month of November. The Labor Department announced that unemployment is declining and was 8.6 percent for last month. Roughly 120 thousand private jobs were created in the month of November, but critics say retail and hospitality jobs aren't the type of jobs America needs. Others say that this doesn't make up for the new people joining the workforce. Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal, sounds off on the issue. Source